I'm currently working on an AI strategy project for the Foundational Research Institute; they are hiring and do not require plenty of experience:
Requirements
- Language requirement is research proficiency in English.
- We anticipate that an applicant is dedicated to alleviating and preventing suffering, and considers it the top global priority.
- A successful applicant will probably have a background in quantitative topics such as game theory, decision theory, computer science, physics, or math. But we welcome applicants regardless of background.
- Peer-reviewed publications or a track record of completed comparable research output is not required, but a plus.
- There is no degree requirement, although a PhD is an advantage, all else equal.
Their open research questions include a number of AI-related ones, and I expect many of them to still have plenty of low-hanging fruit. I'm working on getting a better handle on hard takeoff scnearios in general; most of the my results so far can be found on my website under the "fri-funded" tag. (Haven't posted anything new in a while, because I'm working on a larger article that's been taking some time.)
Will your results ultimately take the form of blog posts such as those, or peer-reviewed publications, or something else?
I think FRI's research agenda is interesting and that they may very well work on important questions that hardly anyone else does, but I haven't yet supported them as I'm not certain about their ability to deliver actual results or the impact of their research, and find it a tad bit odd that it's supported by effective altruism organizations, since I don't see any demonstration of effectiveness so far. (No offence though, it looks promising.)
(I'm re-posting my question from the Welcome thread, because nobody answered there.)
I care about the current and future state of humanity, so I think it's good to work on existential or global catastrophic risk. Since I've studied computer science at a university until last year, I decided to work on AI safety. Currently I'm a research student at Kagoshima University doing exactly that. Before April this year I had only little experience with AI or ML. Therefore, I'm slowly digging through books and articles in order to be able to do research.
I'm living off my savings. My research student time will end in March 2017 and my savings will run out some time after that. Nevertheless, I want to continue AI safety research, or at least work on X or GC risk.
I see three ways of doing this:
Oh, and I need to be location-independent or based in Kagoshima.
I know http://futureoflife.org/job-postings/, but all of the job postings fail me in two ways: not location-independent and requiring more/different experience than I have.
Can anyone here help me? If yes, I would be happy to provide more information about myself.
(Note that I think I'm not in a precarious situation, because I would be able to get a remote software development job fairly easily. Just not in AI safety or X or GC risk.)